Tuesday’s joint announcement of a close partnership between IBM and Pivotal left questions unanswered. Specifically, why is IBM making this very public investment in a relationship with a subsidiary of EMC, one of its major competitors in storage? For Pivotal this is definitely a big win. It endorses Cloud Foundry to IBM’s 9,000 Cloud customers and potentially to the larger community of IBM channel partners and users who may be moving to the Cloud later or who are building their own private clouds on OpenStack and WebSphere. But why is IBM bringing Pivotal into its fold?

The answer, it turns out, is three letters: AWS. IaaS is a big part of the business strategy for IBM (and HP, and the other major hardware vendors). All the hardware vendors face erosion of their markets as customers move application development and production compute loads to public Cloud services. The vendors’ answer is to create their own IaaS services. The problem is that AWS has become the giant of the Cloud, capturing a huge share of the initial business. And while much of that is development today, AWS is totally proprietary, which means that it becomes harder to move applications developed on AWS to another platform when they go into production.

Cloud Foundry, by contrast, is an Open Standards-based Platform-as-a-Service technology that is complementary and can run on OpnStack. James Watters, director of product, marketing, and ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, explained it this way. “One of the core challenges today is hiring and retaining good developers.” To do that and get the most out of your developers, “you need a Platform-as-a-Service, because it expresses all the commands that you need very succinctly. You don’t have to learn about operating systems, you don’t have to understand the VM operations world, you don’t have to understand load balancing and configuration. You simply take a WAR file, in the case of Java, give it to our command line, and say, “Push”, and the platform does everything else…. The developer literally never has to leave their domain knowledge around developing applications to deploy and manage those applications.” This saves huge amounts of valuable developer time and makes developers happier.

IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Industry Standards in the Software Group Standards Strategy organization Chris Ferris added, “Cloud Foundry takes out all of the need to stand up a physical server, even a virtual environment, then put the underlying runtime and framework or container environment on that, configure it and tune it and so forth, before you can even start doing your development.”

He confirmed that Cloud Foundry will be available on the IBM OpenCloud. Actually it is already there, as part of Project BlueMix, a limited preview environment that IBM is testing with selected customers. This will make the IBM OpenCloud much more attractive as an alternative to AWS for development for IBM customers, giving OpenCloud strong differentiation from its biggest competitor.

Combining Strengths

Of course this is not the whole story. CloudFoundry version 2 has incorporated the Buildpack technology from Heroku, which enables programming language runtimes and frameworks to be integrated easily. IBM is already demonstrating WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core running in a Buildpack on top of Cloud Foundry.  WebSphere, Ferris said, “is designed to scale vertically, making things bigger, better, faster.” However the Hadoop Big Data world scales horizontally, and so does Cloud Foundry. Combining them allows users to build applications to scale both horizontally and vertically. “The complement each other.”

IBM is also working with Pivotal to extend the Java Buildpack that ships with Open JDK, the Spring Framework, and TopCat, to deliver IBM Java and IBM’s WebSphere applications server on top of Cloud Foundry. “So if you’re familiar with WebSphere and you like using the new WebSphere Liberty Profile, this could be something that you might choose to use as a developer.” Of course most developers familiar with WebSphere are either working for IBM, its channel partners, or customers, meaning that this definitely is a defensive move by IBM to hold onto its customers as they transition to the Cloud.

IBM is also focusing on “ensuring that our Liberty Core profile is very fast”, with the goal of providing better performance than any of the other J2KK containers, making WebSphere more attractive to developers and again helping to keep IBM customers on the IBM platform.

And IBM is using this to make a high-profile entry into the Cloud Foundry community as partner with one of the chief developers of Cloud Foundry. Already a major presence in Linux and, of course OpenStack, this cements its reputation as a major supporter of the Open Systems community, an important consideration for a company still living down its old reputation for customer lock-in.

That presence will be hammered home by IBM’s co-sponsorship of the semi-annual Open Stack community meetings, the first of which is scheduled for early September. This first meeting, Watters said, is intended mainly to provide community members to get to know each other, although it will include some presentations and discussion sessions. Then the course of future meetings will be determined by the interests of the community.

All of this leaves one other question. Certainly this alliance could not have happened without the direct involvement of EMC CEO Joe Tucci and from someone high up at IBM. So that implies that the two vendors, who are fierce competitors in the storage arena, are talking at a high level. So the question is, what will be the next shoe and when will it drop?